Tuesday, 10 January 2012

RUNO LAGOMARSINO 'OTHERWHERE' AT NIELS STAERK, COPENHAGEN

press release:
RUNO LAGOMARSINO

OtherWhere

29.10 - 17.12. 2011

OtherWhere, the title of Runo Lagomarsino's exhibition, is a starting point, an indication of the narration and visual approach that the exhibition displays and formulates. It carries issues related to travel, placement/ displacement and the constructions of spaces; being it the gallery, a nation or the cracks on a Modernist building.

In the centre of the gallery six tables display several postcards of national commercial airlines. The depicted airplanes are from different parts of the world and time periods. There are postcards from companies that for one reason or another have ceased to operate, including those from countries that don't exist anymore or have changed their name. On each of the postcards there is a line of pebbles placed side by side. As the original airplanes once did or still do and as the postcards were designed to do, the stones have also been travelling, in a conjunction of a metaphoric travelling and an actual one. The stones have been collected in different locations, during walks taken by the artist or by friends and colleagues who contributed to the collection, building a collective narrative of places and people.

The artist has meticulously positioned the stones to cover the aircrafts' windows. All the windows are covered, not letting the passengers look out or the viewers look in. It is the stones that hold the airplane on the table, forcing each of them to stay, preventing them to fly. There is a visual paradox between the physicality of the stones and the postcards, and the nature of the aircrafts they represent.

"If you hold a stone, hold it in your hand. If you feel the weight, you'll never be late. To understand."
(Caetano Veloso)

Thin papers are hanged throughout one of the gallery walls, from the beams to the floor. Looking closer one can see that it's actually a measuring device, somehow quantifying the gallery space; or the viewers. At the same time, being a very light and fragile material, with its imperfections and instability, it point towards the impossibility of any unchanging and uniform measuring mechanism. It exposes itself as an arbitrary, imaginary construction.

On another way of rethinking mechanisms of generalization and constructions of space and geography, the artist occupies another wall with a small sculptured text. A sentence built with hand-scaled MDF letters currently sold in craft shops reads: RUNO IS NOT A NATION. The artist' name in this enunciation balances personal narratives with those assumed in universalizing discourses. This exemplifies the ways in which Lagomarsino has developed a distinct and subtle aesthetic in which image and text articulate a political discourse through poetic gestures.

The second room of the gallery, the work ContraTiempos uses the Parque Ibirapuera, in São Paulo, as its starting point. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx, the park was inaugurated in 1954 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the city. A slide projection loop records the artist's search for images of the South-American map in the cracks of the paved path that unites the different buildings in the park. There is an element of performativity as the artist walks along the 28.000 square meters marquise, seeking the aged concrete for fissures that resemble his idea and memory of this territory's outline.

Not only in this walk through the park and in the collection of pebbles, but also in previous works, such us Trans Atlantic and Horizon (Southern Sun Drawing), the performative aspect is becoming more and more central. This component is not directly on display, but it is crucial in the process and it inhabits the narration of the work.

Runo Lagomarsino (born in Lund, 1977; lives and works in Malmö and São Paulo) participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York 2007-8 and received an MFA from the Malmö Art Academy in 2003. Recent Soloshows include Violent Corners ar/ge kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano; Trans Atlantic Art Statements, Basel; There is always a day away, Galeria Luisa Strina (Espaço projeto), São Paulo (in 2011). Recent group exhibitions include Speech Matters Danish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), Istanbul and The Crisis of Confidence Prague Biennale 5, Prague (in 2011). The Moderna Exhibition 2010, Moderna Museet, Stockholm;The Travelling Show, Colección Jumex, Mexico City; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Social at the Berardo Collection, Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon (in 2010) Report on Probability Kunsthalle Basel; Free as Air and Water, 41 Cooper Gallery, New York; Panorama da Arte Brasiliera, Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paolo; OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding, Parsons the New School for Design, New York (in 2009) .

EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS AND TEXTS BY PLB

ABOUT ME

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." from
Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

SHORT BIO

Pablo León de la Barra is an exhibition maker, independent curator and researcher. He was born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; ‘George and Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at the ICA-London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture Foundation-London; ‘Sueño de Casa Propia’(2007-2008, in collaboration with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico City, and Cordoba, Spain; ‘This Is Not America’ at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); ‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at the CCE in Guatemala (2010); ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010); ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); 'Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way' at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro (co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez, 2011); 'MicroclimaS' at Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); 'Esquemas para una Oda Tropical', Rio de Janeiro, 2012; 'Marta 'Che' Traba' at Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires (2012); Novo Museo Tropical at Teoretica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2012); Museu Labirinto / Museum of Unlimited Growth, ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2012); The Camino Real Arcades, Lima, Peru (2012). PLB has acted as advisor and/or art curator for the following art fairs: Pinta/London (2010-12), Maco/Mexico (2009-1012), Circa/Puerto Rico (2010), La Otra/Bogota (2009), ArteBA/ Buenos Aires (2012), ArtRio/Rio de Janeiro (2011-2013). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for: Frog/Paris, PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Tar/Italy, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico, Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Metropolis M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico. PLB has also written texts for many artists and exhibition catalogues, lectured internationally and participated in many international symposiums where relevant topics to arts, culture and society have been discussed. PLB was co-director of ‘24-7’ an artists-curatorial collective in London from 2002-2005 and artistic director of ‘Blow de la Barra’ in London from 2005-2008. From 2005 to 2012 he was curator of the White Cubicle Gallery in London, a community art space which he also founded. He is also founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, a museum yet to physically exist somewhere in the tropics and curated the First Bienal Tropical in San Juan Puerto Rico (2011). He is also the publisher of Pablo Internacional Editions and editor of his own blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. He lives and works between London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Bogota, Lima, Athens, Beirut...